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Wednesday, March 22, 2017

223. Silicon Valley: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Chapter Eighteen
Breaking Out of the Trap
We have a choice to make once and for all: between the empire and the spiritual and
physical salvation of our people. No road for the people will ever be open unless the
government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the
country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as quoted by Pravda (1986)
To hell with the cheese, let's get out of this trap!
— A mouse
Silicon Valley
To reform our treatment of the young, we must force the center of gravity of the school
world to change. In this chapter I'll try to show you what I mean, but my method will be
largely indirect. To fashion the beginnings of a solution from these materials will require
your active engagement in an imaginative partnership with me, one that shall commence
in Silicon Valley.
I went to Silicon Valley in the middle of 1999 to speak to some computer executives at
Cypress Semiconductor on the general topic of school reform. The fifty or sixty who
showed up to my talk directly from work were dressed so informally they might easily
have been mistaken for pizza delivery men or taxicab drivers. The CEO of the
corporation, its founder T.J. Rodgers, was similarly turned out. I didn't recognize him as
the same famous man portrayed on a large photo mural mounted on the wall outside until
he introduced me to the audience and the audience to me.
To let me know who my auditors were, Rodgers said that everyone there was a
millionaire, none needed to work for him because all were self-sufficient and could find
work all over the place simply by walking into a different company. They worked for
Cypress because they wanted to, just as he did himself and, like him, they were usually
hard at it from very early morning until long after five o'clock. Because they wanted to.
The thesis of my talk was that the history of forced schooling in America, as elsewhere, is
the history of the requirements of business. School can't be satisfactorily explained by
studying the careers of ideologues like Horace Mann or anyone else. The problem of
American education from a personal or a family perspective isn't really a problem at all
from
the vantage point of big business, big finance, and big government. What's a problem to
me is a solution for them. An insufficient incentive exists to change things much,
otherwise things would change. I learned that from Adam Smith, Smith turns out to be a
much different sensibility than the priesthood. of corporate apologiests thinks he is.
Regard it this way: in our present system, those abstract bignesses are saddled with the
endless responsibility of finding a place for hundreds of millions of people, and the even
more daunting challenge of creating demand for products and services which, historically
viewed, few of us need or want. Because of this anomaly, a Procrustean discipline
emerges in which the entire population must continually be cut or stretched to fit the
momentary convenience of the economy. This is a free market only in fantasy; it seems
free because ceaseless behind-the-scenes efforts maintain the illusion, but its reality is
much different. Prodigies of psychological and political insight and wisdom gathered
painfully over the centuries are refined into principles, taught in elite colleges, and
consecrated in the service of this colossal tour deforce of appearances.
Let me illustrate. People love to work, but they must be convinced that work is a kind of
curse, that they must arrange the maximum of leisure and labor-saving devices in their
lives upon which belief many corporations depend; people love to invent solutions, to be
resourceful, to make do with what they have, but resourcefulness and frugality are
criminal behaviors to a mass production economy, such examples threaten to infect
others with the same fatal sedition; similarly, people love to attach themselves to favored
possessions, even to grow old and die with them, but such indulgence is dangerous
lunacy in a machine economy whose costly tools are continually renewed by enormous
borrowings; people like to stay put but must be convinced they lead pinched and barren
existences without travel; people love to walk but the built world is now laid out so they
have to drive. Worst of all are those who yearn for productive, independent livelihoods
like the Amish have, and nearly all free Americans once had. If that vision spreads, a
consumer economy is sunk. For all these and other reasons, the form of schooling we get
is largely a kind of consumer and employee training. This isn't just incidentally true.
Common sense should tell you it's necessarily so if the economy is to survive in any
recognizable form.
Every principal institution in our culture is a partner with the particular form of
corporatism which has began to dominate America at the end of WWII. Call it paternal
corporatism, wise elites can be trained to provide for the rest of us, who will be kept as
children. Unlike Plato's Guardians whom they otherwise resemble, this meritorious elite
is not kept poor but is guaranteed prosperity and status in exchange for its oversight. An
essential feature of this kind of central management is that the population remain
mystified, specialized dependent, and childish.
The school institution is clearly a key partner in this arrangement: it suppresses the
productive impulse in favor of consumption; it redefines "work" as a job someone
eventually gives you if you behave; it habituates a large clientele to sloth, envy, and
boredom; and it accustoms individuals to think of themselves as members of a class with
various distinguishing features. More than anything else, school is about class
consciousness. In addition, it makes intellectual work and creative thinking appear like
distasteful or difficult labor to most of us. None of this is done to oppress, but because the
economy would dissolve into something else if those attitudes didn't become ingrained in
childhood.
We have evolved a subtly architected, delicately balanced command economy and class-
based society upon which huge efforts are lavished to make it appear like something else.
The illusion has been wearing thin for years; that's a principal reason why so many
people don't bother to vote. In such a bargain, the quality of schooling is distinctly
secondary; other values are uppermost. A great many children see through the fraud in
elementary school but lack the language and education to come to proper terms with their
feelings. In this system, a fraction of the kids are slowly over time let in on a part of this
managerial reality because they are intended to eventually be made into Guardians
themselves, or Guardian's assistants.
School is a place where a comprehensive social vision is learned. Without a contrary
vision to offer, the term "school reform" is only a misnomer describing trivial changes.
Any large alteration of forced schooling, which might jeopardize the continuity of
workers and customers that the corporate economy depends upon, is unthinkable without
some radical change in popular perception preceding it. Business/School partnerships and
School-to-Work legislation aren't positive developments, but they represent the end of
any pretense that ordinary children should be educated. That, in any case, was the burden
of my talk at Cypress.
Deregulating Opportunity